IT/Dev Connections Official Hashtag and a Twitter Tip for Windows Phone

If you'll be joining me for IT/Dev Connections in a couple weeks, I have a tip for you.

If you're still on the deciding line of registering, I highly suggest you do it quickly. IT/Dev Connections is a unique event where community comes first, even though the sessions and speakers are stellar. In fact, as you'll read in The Microsoft Management Summit: Saying Goodbye to a Good Friend, IT/Dev Connections is being molded into the perfect conference. You can still register HERE.

In the past 4 or 5 years, Twitter participation at conferences has steadily increased. In fact, some would say it exploded due to the realization of the value for providing a steady stream of live information from the event. There's many aspects to the value side of participating, including breaking news about product releases, keeping an active log of tips and tricks from the sessions, and supplying information to those who couldn't attend for one reason or another. There are many, many others, but the fact remains that many of you are finding Twitter to be a hugely useful conference tool.

One of the more painful things about using Twitter at a conference is having to type and retype the official Twitter hashtag for every tweet, particularly if the hashtag is a long one. So, I sought to find a way to make it much simpler and wanted to share the tip in the event you haven't found your own solution yet.

If you're using a laptop or tablet at IT/Dev Connections, the copy/paste method works pretty well. Basically, you just stick the official event hashtag (#devconnections) in a Notepad file, along with important Twitter handles you want to repurpose, write your tweet, copy/paste the content from the Notepad file, and then transmit your completed tweet.

But, what if you have a Windows Phone? Windows Phone can only retain a single item in the clipboard. If you happen to copy something else, your original text is lost. So, I went looking and located a Windows Phone app called Copy n Paste.

Copy n Paste is an app that provides storage for text that you most commonly use, allowing you to quickly copy the text to the clipboard, switch back to the primary app, and paste it.

Here's how it works…

After you've downloaded and installed the app, run it:

Next, create your first entry by giving it a short name and the actual text you want to copy later. In my case, I created a short name of ITDEV and my paste text, the official IT/Dev Connections Twitter hashtag, #devconnections.

Once you've saved your new item, just tap on it and the app will save the paste text to the Windows Phone clipboard.

Jump back to the app you will be posting from, created your tweet, and then use Windows Phone's built in paste function to include the Twitter hashtag.

There's two versions of the app. One is a free version that displays advertisements, and the other is ad- free but costs $1.29. Understandably, we all hate ads, so for me, spending the $1.29 for the ad-free version was a no-brainer.

You can either search the Windows Phone Store for 'Copy n Paste', or use the links below:

Copy n Paste Free

Copy n Paste

You can use the app for all sorts of different reasons and occasions, so while it's great for conferences, it can be used for anything you can dream up.

Now, I'm sure iOS and Android users have something similar available to them. From what I remember, Android would only allow you to copy/paste if the device was rooted and iOS wouldn't allow copy/paste no matter what. That may have changed, as I've not used either type of device for months (since my switch back to Windows Phone). If you know of ways to provide the same function for those device types, drop a note and let me know.